Selling the Medium to Sell the Idea: How to Pitch an Idea in an Age of Rapid Tech Growth (for beginners)

The advertising and marketing industries run at a very fast pace, but even they can have a hard time keeping up technology. It’s rare that an ad agency gets the chance to present a tech-based idea to a client when it’s still in it’s early adoption phase and has a chance to blow up with the platform, and it’s even rarer that they are able to sell the idea. The truth is, simplicity is a rare commodity in the technological age, but it is crucial to save your idea from being killed in the boardroom.

As technology evolves and the opportunities grow, the job of selling your tech-based ideas will grow even more difficult; if something sounds complicated, it doesn’t sound good. Even if the idea is great, it is hard to sell the idea when you also have to sell the technology or the medium, so take a look at a few tips to help you bring your social media and technology-based ideas to life.

Y'all know the drill...read the tips on the Social Media Marketing blog.

Social Media is Not a Strategy

One of the first things I ever learned in marketing was that “cool” in and of itself is not a strategy. Sure, it might turn a few heads. But will they remember what it said about your brand? Will they remember your brand at all? Unfortunately, “cool” rarely works when it comes to translating advertising into sales. Neither does “technology;” I remember the first augmented reality demonstration I saw, but I can’t tell you what the product category was, much less the brand. Similarly, “social media” is not a strategy.

Don’t misunderstand me. Social media integration is something many businesses ought to be considering as a potentially prominent part of their larger marketing plan, but it is so easy to think that being on social networks is the strategy itself. Unfortunately, it’s a much bigger picture. Social media is the means to the end, the channel for your message, so it’s important to consider what you want to say before taking the leap.

As always, my full article can be found on the Social Media Marketing blog. I promise I'll spend some time writing something just for YOU, my loyal readers, soon.

Betting on Chat Roulette

At any given time, you can expect to find over 20,000 people on Chat Roulette, the new one-on-one video, audio, and text chat service. After a slow launch with only 200-300 users at any given time as recently as late December, Chat Roulette has exploded as the newest way to explore and connect. Based off the same principle as text-only Amiga, Chat Roulette pairs strangers in real time from across the world to chat via web cam. The motivations are varied—to practice English, find musicians to jam with, to meet girls, to live out a persona—but the service is still in the free-for-all early stage. Garnering massive attention through blogs of screen shots and the occasional story of running into the Jonas Brothers, Chat Roulette is still forming as a new social medium.

Still in its infancy, Chat Roulette certainly doesn’t have much structure, but as with most new technologies and services, key community players can help guide the service into what it will become. Luckily, marketers have a chance to carry this torch, much as Twitter has been defined in part by accounts like ComcastCares and Zappos. By building a valuable presence and helping demonstrate the opportunities and faculties of Twitter, these marketers actually helped blaze the trail and create some of the mores of the community. Chat Roulette, though chaotic at the best of times, listless (or naked) at the worst, offers a new platform for advertisers to help create a community aligned to their offerings.

Read the rest of my article at the Social Media Marketing blog.

How Social Media is Changing Television

We have always gathered around the storytellers of our day: our elders, a radio, the television. When JFK was shot, families and neighbors came together across the country to watch the coverage, consider the implications of JFK’s death, and support each other. Each winter, epic parties take place in homes across America to watch the Super Bowl. My own college roommates even had weekly parties to watch The OC and American Idol. With the knowledge that we seem to be built with the desire to share these storytelling experiences, social media takes on a whole new meaning for both its creators and its participants.

Hulu introduced live-streaming to its offerings during the 2008 Presidential election debates, joining a handful of other sites with similar viewing options. Though live-blogging has been regular feature of many sites in recent years, the widespread introduction of television online and live-streaming have been a game-changer for these online conversations, and that is only the beginning.

Click here to read the rest of the article. (Got to give my editor some love!)

Facebook Ups the Ante with new Comment-by email functionality

As I've mentioned before, I've been writing for a blog called Social Media Marketing. The following is the first bit from a piece I wrote last week. To read the full article, check it out here.

Many of us have come to depend on Facebook for daily entertainment, connecting with old friends, or communication to pass the time. Since it’s launch in early 2004, the site has evolved greatly from the small, relatively exclusive site with an emphasis placed on what individuals put out there for others to see. As time went on and poking (thankfully) fell out of fashion, the way we communicated with each other on Facebook changed drastically. We started with messages, sent directly and privately from sender to recipient. When the wall was launched, most folks took their conversations public, but those conversations always ran the risk of being deleted by others who wanted to claim more space on the page. Anyone else remember those early day free-for-alls? Oh, how things have changed.

OMG, SM is totes sweet! Avoiding a Communication Breakdown

In the days of Facebook status updates and 140-character tweets, the language we use has been getting more and more concise, though not necessarily simpler (as those of us not familiar with “1337 $p34k” and the TXTing language the youth population can attest.) For businesses utilizing social media platforms, this has been both a blessing and a curse: it has forced us to quite literally consider the language of our consumers and learn how to interact with them, but it has also forces our hand a bit. The brevity of our social media interactions means we have little time to make an impression. Therefore, there is more importance placed on the crafting of those messages. Social media is often viewed as being more casual, but that doesn’t mean that all convention can go to the wayside;spelling, grammar, and clarity are still crucial to successful communication.

Want to read more? Check it out on my page at the Social Media Marketing blog.